Formerly tenured at the University of Birmingham (UK), Essaka Joshua came to Notre Dame in 2008. She is the author of The Romantics and the May Day Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007 and Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. She has also published journal articles on writers including Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Smith, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and George Bernard Shaw in publications such as the Journal of the History of Ideas, Philological Quarterly, European Romantic Review, The Eighteenth Century Novel, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Gothic Studies. Her work has appeared in a major essay collection by Harold Bloom (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: The Brontës – New Edition. New York: Chelsea House, 2008) and her second monograph was shortlisted for the Folklore Society’s 2008 Katherine Briggs Award — an award previously won by E. P. Thompson, Vladimir Propp, and Marina Warner. Joshua held a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Oxford (Oriel College) in 2005–6, and has won $85,000 in grant awards, including a British Academy Research Grant for research on Göttingen University in the 1820s (2006) and an ISLA Faculty Lead Grant of $15,000 from the University of Notre Dame (2010). Essaka Joshua has organized a conference on (Re)defining Romantic Keywords at the Department of English, University of Birmingham (2006) and a conference on Blindness at the University of Notre Dame (2009). She founded the Disability Studies Forum at Notre Dame in 2008, bringing together a lively research group through a visiting-speaker program.

“Wordsworth Amongst the Aristotelians.” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 513–24.

“Charlotte Smith’s Desmond: Romance and the Man of Principle in the Domestic and Public Spheres.” The Eighteenth Century Novel 5 (2006): 277–319.

“William Weir, Thomas James Arnold and the Attribution of Articles in the Wellesley Index and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.” Scottish Historical Review, 86 (2007): 319–27. Co-authored with Eleoma Joshua (50% co-authorship).